We all have ideas tossing around in our heads, but will these ideas realize into a viable business with paying customers?
Ideas are cheap! Anyone can come up with a great idea.
Supply & demand comes into effect, how do I know if there is demand for my idea (whether it be a product or service or whatever).
Supply & demand comes into effect, how do I know if there is demand for my idea (whether it be a product or service or whatever).
So, you might be asking yourself, what do I do?
You need to market test your idea for demand – gain feedback! Look for signals. By market testing our ideas, we can gain valuable feedback as to whether we should further purse these ideas. Experiment!
You can do this for under $25 dollars – and what is that equal? A date night at the movies? A tank of gas?
You can do this for under $25 dollars – and what is that? A date night at the movies? A tank of gas?
You can do this for under $25 dollars – and what is that? A date night at the movies? A tank of gas?
You can do this for under $25 dollars – and what is that? A date night at the movies? A tank of gas?
Don’t be afraid to suck
So, here is the plan. We need to get our ideas out onto the web to test them. How do we do that? By following the plan above.
You want to explore all the ways to frame your idea. Think of the benefits it would provide. Think of the different ways to phrase your offering. Think of how people will be searching for your solution. What problem is your solution solving?
Powerpoint 2007 is a powerful tool to prototype your idea. You can mockup a site in minutes and get it ready for feedback. I’ve booked markedlanding pages to get a “feel” for what is common in landing page design. Visit my Site brandonmcnamara.com
Powerpoint 2007 is a powerful tool to prototype your idea. You can mockup a site in minutes and get it ready for feedback. I’ve booked markedlanding pages to get a “feel” for what is common in landing page design. Visit my Site brandonmcnamara.com
Here is an example of a mock up of a site.
Here is an example of a mock up of a site.
I purchased ubisqus.com – don’t stress yourself over the name for too long. This can delay time to test your domain name. Also, purchase a plan as you see fit – there are varying plans, but I opted to do the full year to reuse my website domain as a testing platform.
I purchased ubisqus.com – don’t stress yourself over the name for too long. This can delay time to test your domain name. Also, purchase a plan as you see fit – there are varying plans, but I opted to do the full year to reuse my website domain as a testing platform.
Most of us aren’t web developers, and we need a quick and easy way to get our ideas up in running in under an hour. Snappages allows us to do this. There are other websites out there that can accomplish this, such as Website 1, Website 2, Website 3. But for this example, we’ll use Snapppages.
We can get this functionality for $8 a month.
Our total is now $20
First implementation of the website. Snappages isn’t the most versitle tool, but it gets the job done to get something up to test. Used a copy of a slide saved as a .JPG as my landing home page. I then uploaded it as a Image, and then placed a button action that takes you to a “sign up” page, which is also located on the navigation bar. Unfortunately, you are constrained by the “Theme” within Snappages and you can’t alter the navigation bars location (or I may not know how).
Added a Features and Sign Up. For this iteration, I tried to include four features. Each feature will have a benefit statement. I wasn’t sure if I should add the side text that explains the benefits, but I did anyways. I’ve read in some places that you should just focus on features, then allow your customers to interact with your product. Once you are able to survey your customers you can then get a better idea of the benefits received.
The sign up button (which navigates you in the same location as the sign up link in the navigation bar) is located “below the fold”. I’m not happy about this, but couldn’t find a way to reduce the margins at the top of the body to allow for the sign up button to show up before the fold.
This is the Powerpoint slide saved “as” a JPG. This is where you could iterate. Ideally you’d be able to include some interactivity to the “features” since they look like buttons.
Powerpoint Slide saved as an image
Optimization would allow you to test these two pages to see which one has a better conversion rate. Currently, the feature is not available in Snappages. Hint..hint…
Sign Up – What is the call to action? Would I have a higher conversion rate if I had the sign up form displayed? Need to iterate.Text says, “We are currently developing ________. In you’d like to be made aware when _______ is available for testing, please sign up below. We are developing _________ by the Lean Startup Methodology. “Contact: brandon [dot] mcnamara [at] gmail
How will we pull in “customer” to our website? Google Adwords.
$5/day budget – Will it be enough to drive traffic? Have I selected
This is my first iteration for my ad. You’ll need to practice with the character limits, but the goal is to create a compelling ad to drive traffic to your website.
This is my second iteration for my ad. These suck, but you get the idea, iterate. Try things out.
This is my third iteration for my ad. Will people want this? Not sure, but I’m experimenting.
Test, iterate, try things, experiment – see what works, what doesn’t work.
Test, iterate, try things, experiment – see what works, what doesn’t work.
Keywords – The search words typed in a google search box
Clicks – The number of people whose attention you’ve captured – these are “signals”
Impressions – How many times your ad has been “displayed” in a search result
Click Thru Rate – The number of Clicks / Impressions
It costs $5 to start, but you can pre-pay additional funds. I do $40.
We’ll track and measure our progress with Google Analytics – it’s FREE!
Powerpoint Slide copied as an image
Bounce Rate, Avg Time on Site, Visits, Page Views,
Set up goals to track conversions: landing page, features, sign up,
Set up goals to track conversions: landing page, features, sign up,
Conversions (e.g. people signing up) are signals. Listen to your signals.